Training for a half marathon, how much should I eat?

wiserebel

Hi everyone,

So I'm almost at my target and I am now seriously training for a half marathon, how much do you think I should eat?

Very quick back story, I've been using myfitnesspal for about 8 months and its been great, I've lost 50lbs so far and I've about 6lbs away from my target. I turned 30 in April and I'm in the best shape of my life! Good Times!!

My measurements are

5ft 7,
160lbs
about 20% body fat (this is what I want to get down)
about 40% muscle mass
The body fat and muscle mass figures are taken from our Omron BF511 Blue Family Body Composition Monitor.

I've started to seriously train for a half marathon, I'm running between 20 - 40 miles a week. My target time for the race is 1h45mins.

I've been eating around about between 1700-1800 calories on non training days for the past few month. Sometimes I'll eat back all my calories after a big workout, sometimes I'm just not that hungry or I run out of things to eat when I still have loads calories left

My question is, what do people think the best plan of action is to do, either

Stick to myfitnesspal, eat around 1800 calories on rest days and then try to eat all my calories back on training days

Or

Using something like this

http://scoobysworkshop.com/calorie-calculator/#projectedweightloss

And go for a overall calorie amount every day of 2384, this will give me a 10% calorie reduction.

I'm not really interested in losing weight anymore but I do want to bring my body fat levels down to between 10% - 15%

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Si

sdreed25

Stick to myfitnesspal, eat around 1800 calories on rest days and then try to eat all my calories back on training days

I idd this when I trained for mine, worked for me.

wiserebel

cool, thanks for the reply.

sdreed25

No problem, also worth nothing that in the 2-3 weeks leading up to race day I ate at zero deficit everyday to make sure I was fuelled at at my best for race day

Good luck, I'm thinking about re-entering the one I did last year which is in 12 weeks

sjp_511

I do something in between the 2 options that you suggest. I do my long runs in the morning so I eat extra calories the day before to fuel up and will eat back the rest of the calories later in the day. The rest of the week I try keep my calories close to even. If I get all my workouts in, I will have 4 workouts that burn 400-600 calories and a long run that can burn 800 calories or more depending on my mileage for that week.

wiserebel

Good thinking about the 2/3 weeks before, I would have never considered that.

sjp_511, your calorie burned amounts seem pretty close to mine. I tend to run on the evenings but I'm finding running after a whole days worth of food isn't a lot of fun so I'm switching to morning runs this week to see if that helps, so this sounds like a good plan! Thanks